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The making of Art Maker

As a budding pianist, Amy Nelson’s parents said that if she practiced hard enough, one day she might be good enough to be on Play School.

Many years later, some very different skills got Amy inside the magical world that she loved as a child – helping design the hugely popular Play School app, Art Maker.

Amy kept the distinctive Play School piano (“That to me is the sound of the show”) and its gentle tinkling, along with the voices of familiar presenters and the crafty, homemade look of the app, all reflect the Play School world that children know and love.

The app also mirrors the iconic program’s success, with more than 500,000 downloads since its launch in late 2011. It is consistently ranked in the top five most popular ABC apps, alongside such giants as the triple j, iview and iPhone apps.

“We were hoping it would be really popular, but there is no way that we had anticipated this,” Amy said.

The popular Art Maker app

Internationally, the number of downloads in China – 41,341 since launch – suggest it is being used to teach English, while 98,000 downloads in the US reveal its popularity as a language and education tool.

Anecdotal evidence also shows it has found favour in a few niche markets, with speech therapists and parents of autistic children talking up its benefits, like this from Specialneedsmum on iTunes:

“My six year old has low functioning autism and this engages him constructively for ages. An Australian accent and great words like ‘Diddle’, ‘Big Ted’, ‘Pom Pom’ and ‘Jemima’ have the consonant-vowel-sounding consonant combination we are using to achieve speech, and we are getting close.”

“We had a few comments in the app store from parents of children with low level autism or speech difficulty – that they were using the app and having a really lovely time with it, it is actually improving speech,” Amy said.

“It is so touching and something we didn’t expect. People send pretty emotional messages, they say ‘my son is obsessed with it, he is calm and sits with it and there is hardly anything else that I can use for that’.”

Part of its charm is the way Art Maker straddles a wide demographic – from 18 months to five or six year old children.

“We thought maybe we would hit the sweet spot of 3 to 4 which is the core Play School demographic. But a child of two is obviously very different to a six-year-old.”

One secret to this success was having various levels of difficulty for the tasks.

“So we have things that are super easy to do – drop an object into a view to make a picture – right through to things that are a little bit more difficult, like recording an animation and having your voice recorded over that.”

Amy and information architect Meena Tharmarajah worked with an early childhood learning advisor to help them tailor the app to their intended audience.

Meena’s children were also drafted in as willing guinea pigs, testing the app at every stage to help determine what worked and what didn’t.

The team started out with a huge advantage – that Play School was such a well loved brand – and used many of its features to good effect on the app.

The familiar voices of Play School presenters are the perfect antidote to many kids’ apps that are loud, repetitive and so irritating as to set parents’ teeth on edge.

“We wanted to make it feel like the presenters were there with (the kids), without it becoming annoying – with a lot of apps the sound is overwhelming.

“But here, it is meant to feel they were sitting next to you, praising you and encouraging you very gently.”

Perhaps the greatest element counting for its success is the way in which the app has adopted the program’s approach to fun and learning.

“The focus is really on the child having control and freedom to pretty much make anything they want, because there are so many variations,” she said.

“It is an important thing for kids at that age to not feel they have to do things in a certain order or to get trapped into being told ‘this is the right or wrong way to do it’.

“Play School is not like that at all. It is all about using your imagination and exploring.”

HOT OFF THE PRESS The ABC’s second kids’ app, Play Time, has just hit the AppStore and is already garnering huge interest. When it launched last month, Play Time featured in Apple’s newly launched Kids Section and was already ranking no. 1 in the Kids category and no. 2 in overall.

2 comments on “The making of Art Maker”

I work in the behavioral health field and using your art maker app has helped many struggling children. Sadly, I can not seem to get their little voices to record as a “background noise” is heard instead.